Transition Culture has moved
I no longer blog on this site. You can now find me, my general blogs, and the work I am doing researching my forthcoming book on imagination, on my new blog.
Come find me at robhopkins.net
20 Feb 2008
The past couple of Saturdays I have spent happily in the garden in the worryingly unseasonal weather, beginning the process of turning my not very useful garden into something more useful, building my family’s resilience, food security and gardening ability. The garden is a south-facing slope, with about 4 inches of topsoil on top of what is gravelly clay. I have long been a devotee of no-dig raised bed gardens, but have never had to construct one onto a slope before. In my previous garden I made un-edged raised beds on the level, but in these sloped surroundings, something more substantial was called for.
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19 Feb 2008
**The Transition Handbook** will be available to order here at Transition Culture on February 28th, the wait is nearly over (more on that soon). By way of starting to introduce you to it, and by way of whetting your appetite for its many wonders, here is the introduction to the book, which first introduces the concept of resilience.
*Apricots drying on rooftops in Hunza. A drawing from the author’s sketchbook, August 1990.*
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18 Feb 2008
**Learning, connecting, leading – a two-day Transition Training event, exploring leadership within a Transition perspective.**
(*From publicity by the course organisers*). We felt that with so many communities embarking on the transition journey, now was the time to launch a training event that targets individuals who are stepping into leadership roles within transition initiatives throughout the network. The first instance of this course will be 20/22-June-2008.
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15 Feb 2008
Last night’s **The One Show** on BBC One included a great piece about Transition Town Totnes, which you can watch online for the next 6 days which concluded with the surreal site of Westlife passing Totnes Pounds around and chatting about them! Its not everyday that one sees that kind of thing… . The piece itself crammed a lot into a short time, giving a concise overview of what TTT is all about, and how it is working. I just spent half an hour trying to do screen grabs of images from the piece, but the programme I have they just all go black. Anyone able to do screen grabs for us of Westlife with Totnes Pounds?! (**Update** Thanks to Mark Donaldson who just sent in the pic below..)
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14 Feb 2008
The debate has raged recently among the online peak oil/localization community about whether peak oil will result in the relocalisation of food, or whether it will in fact lead to a shoring up and revalidation of industrial agriculture. Stuart Staniford questioned the assumption that peak oil will inevitably lead to the relocalisation of food supply, an argument which was, I think, pretty thoroughly savaged by the astonishingly productive Sharon Astyk (does this woman sleep?). I want to offer a new angle on this which I hope might add to the ongoing discussion, triggered by a document produced by the British Cabinet Office recently. It raises the possibility that the discussion so far has rather missed the point, and that the key driver for relocalisation, of food at least, will not be peak oil or climate change, but could in fact be the obesity crisis.
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The past couple of Saturdays I have spent happily in the garden in the worryingly unseasonal weather, beginning the process of turning my not very useful garden into something more useful, building my family’s resilience, food security and gardening ability. The garden is a south-facing slope, with about 4 inches of topsoil on top of what is gravelly clay. I have long been a devotee of no-dig raised bed gardens, but have never had to construct one onto a slope before. In my previous garden I made un-edged raised beds on the level, but in these sloped surroundings, something more substantial was called for.
